 Let me begin by welcoming everybody to Future Transform. I'm glad to see you all here. I'd like to introduce the program, but first I'll introduce myself. I'm Brian Alexander, I'm the forum's creator, chief cat herder and host, and for the next hour, we'll be exploring the future of higher education. Now, one further note, today represents a slight shift of our programming. For the past two months, like the rest of the world, we've been extremely concerned with what's going on with the global pandemic. And for week after week, we've had session after session, spectacular guest after spectacular guest here to help us think through the impact of COVID-19 on higher education. And we've cut this through numerous, numerous angles, everything from academic labor, to physical safety, to online teaching, and we're gonna keep doing that. But after we pulled all of you, we got the impression that you'd like to have some of our programming returned to its previous content, that is to focus on everything else that impacts the future of colleges and universities. So right now, we're starting to do that. In fact, for the next couple of weeks, I'll show you at the end of today's session, we'll be touching on other topics as well. So if you'd like to keep up with COVID-19, we'll be touching it, we'll definitely be talking about it. And if I or the guest don't raise the topic, please, this is your forum. You can raise that topic right away, but we'll also be covering other fields as well. Now, our guest today is a splendid writer, an economist who has written a really, really important book on income inequality and what it means for society. And we'd like to bring Jonathan up here in order to talk about what this means for higher education. How do colleges and universities intersect with income inequality? As income and wealth inequality rise, does higher education play a role in accelerating that rise? In other words, do colleges and universities widen the gaps across society? Or does higher education continue to play the role that it did in the middle of the 20th century and try to narrow those gaps and try and produce a middle class? Now, there's a lot you can learn about Jonathan, all kinds of wonderful things about him, including the fact that he is the chief economist for Gallup, so the world's leading polling organization. He also has a beard, which is going on, so I have to naturally reflect him as a result of that. You can buy a copy of his new book, Republic of Equals. There's a button on the bottom left corner of the screen for that, so let me just, first of all, welcome. Hello, Jonathan, greetings. Hello. Oh, I'm really glad to see you. I'm really glad you could make it. How are you doing today? It's a great pleasure to be here. I'm doing very well. Thank you. Social distancing here in Washington, D.C. And as things are going as well as they can under the circumstances. Well, you and I both work in professions where we can do a lot of work without any social contact whatsoever. Indeed. So they designed these for introverts, I think. So there's so many ways I can introduce you to people, Jonathan. There's so many questions I can ask. But the first one I want to ask is, what does the chief economist in Gallup do? Well, it depends on what's going on because one thing that we try to do at Gallup more generally is solve pressing problems to business leaders and to as well as problems facing the general public. And so we do polling on the hottest topics, the most important issues. So lately, I've been doing a lot of writing and research on COVID-19, trying to figure out amongst other things how much economic damage the virus has caused and document what I think are the appropriate policy responses to addressing that. So I've been writing both on Gallup's homepage, a little bit with the New York Times, where I'm a frequent contributor to the upshot column there that some of you may be familiar with. And also on the Brookings homepage where we've been doing some comparisons of how the United States has been doing relative to other countries in terms of its economic policy responses, its reliance on unemployment insurance and things like that. When I'm not, before this crisis, I was doing work on a variety of projects. One was measuring the quality of jobs in the United States. That was a large survey project that I got the chance to work on with the Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation and a mid-year network. And we surveyed 10,000 people and then asked a variety of questions about the quality of their job and the different dimensions that matter to them and how that relates to other aspects of their work and non-work life. Wow, what a great project. Thanks, I found it to be very, very useful. And we've got the data, the publicly, we've got the micro data on our website. So anyone who is so inclined can play around with that data, develop their own research and writing around it. I'd be happy to share that, Link. Very nice. Very nice, thank you. It's kind of a golden age for inequality research. Your project, folks like Sayez, Piketty. Unfortunately, that's true. As a document in my book, it is well known for people who follow the work of Sayez and Piketty and Zuckman. The U.S. income inequality is extraordinarily high and has been rising over the last 40 years. So now we're at roughly 20% of income going to the richest 1% of Americans. And that's up for about 10% in 1980. Which is really a huge, huge difference and not a long period of time. Looking forward, before we dive into your book and into the topic itself, what do you anticipate spending most of your time on over the next year? And that is both kind of practices, what are you gonna be working on and also the ideas? What are you gonna continue to plow the furrow of income inequality or will you do something else? Well, I'd like to continue to do research on income inequality. Some of the projects that I had anticipated working on or have been put on hold as a result of COVID-19. And I'll be looking at the effects and consequences and how they vary by income, by occupation, by race here in the United States. And then how our response and how the relief programs available to us are faring relative to the types of packages that we've seen in European countries as well as Australia and New Zealand. And hopefully shed some light on what kind of policies would be most useful right now and provide some greater certainty as to what we might expect in the next few months in terms of economic recovery. Well, thank you. And good luck with that work that you've done and we'll look forward to it. Friends, I have a couple of questions based on Jonathan's writing, but I just wanna let you know that this is the time when you can start asking your own questions and we already have one question, which I won't do the favor of displaying because it's a terrible joke. Someone asks, when does a joke become a dad joke when it's apparent? But I'm not gonna, that's too awful. The first question I'd like to ask right now is what are the ways in which higher education now reduces income inequality? How does it mitigate that problem? Well, we know from decades of research in labor economics that getting a bachelor's degree or graduate degree, even getting some post-secondary credentials short of a bachelor's degree, not just associate's degree, but certifications, things like that, all those things contribute to how much money someone can earn in the labor market. And there's a very strong relationship between years of education and earnings and degree, the acquisition of degree and earnings. So it depends on when you think about how that plays out in the labor market, it's actually rather complicated because on the one hand, intergenerational mobility issues would, if you're thinking about it through that point of view, then people whose parents do not go to college who go to college and benefit from those earnings advantages are moving up and that's narrowing the income distribution from what it otherwise would be. And certainly there's been a lot of that happening, educational attainment in the United States has increased dramatically over the course of the 20th and I went to the 21st century, slowed down somewhat, but the trend has been one of rising levels of education. So if you think of it from that point of view, we went from a society where very few people were working as professionals and in occupations that required high levels of formal education to a society where now roughly one third of the adult population is working in those kinds of careers. And so that's in a sense narrowed the income distribution. But then on the other hand, for a variety of reasons that the gaps between people with a bachelor's degree and those with just a high school diploma have increased over the last 40 years. And there are a lot of theoretical reasons why economists think that that has occurred, some relating to what they call skilled bias, technological change that the kinds of technologies available are more conducive to creating demand for higher educated workers and making them disproportionately more productive insofar as they're the ones more directly interacting with the technology and using it in some cases, if you're a computer programmer, not only are you using the technology if you're helping to create it. And so obviously demand for those technologies is going to make your skills more lucrative. But then there are those are kind of market-based reasons. You could also throw in trade, but there it's more in some ways, maybe the downward demand for people with a high school diploma, at least in the United States and other rich countries as we've shifted trade offshore. But there are also what you could think of as more political economy explanations for these issues that get to how laws specifically interact with the labor market. And some of them are disproportionately bad for lower income workers. And that would include arguably a large scale immigration of workers with low levels of education who are competing more directly with workers in the United States of the high school diploma. Whereas it's actually very hard to get into this country. If you have a bachelor's degree, you have to qualify in many cases for an H1 visa. And that supply is very limited. And for certain occupations, it's prohibited. You have to practice as a lawyer or a doctor, for example, you have to have accredited at a U.S. university and in many cases or pass in exams. These are U.S. based exams. So some of the competition is kind of encouraged for lower income workers, but discouraged for higher income workers. And so that's I think contributed to the gap between incomes. There are other sorts of distortions in the labor market that favor elite professionals that I just spend a lot of time describing in the book. We can get into later, but going back more directly to higher education, the other side of it obviously is that you can expect to receive higher earnings. And we see this in the data that the Department of Education has put out. Schools that are more selective tend to have graduates who earn higher earnings. And that's also dog tales of the fact that people with higher levels of literacy, numeracy tend to also earn higher, do better in the labor market. And so whether that is driving income inequality or just a reflection of it is kind of complicated to tease out. But certainly there's an aspect of it where early childhood education through high school and the types of skills that the children are learning during those eras are reflected in first of all, whether they're admitted into a selective university. And then if regardless whether they're admitted, whether they're able to qualify to work in a skilled occupation that is highly rewarded in the labor market. And then so it can come both ways. Cause this is fantastic. This is so rich. And friends, you can see why I'm so excited to get Jonathan on here. Let me pose a paradox. We know from a lot of macro economic historical work that throughout the 20th century, the goal was to, one of the things, educate as many people as possible because one of the things the demands for labor involved more education, especially with changing technology. That's the basis of the race between technology and education. I'm blanking on the authors but you can read the book. Golden cats. That's it. But you're saying now that one of the problems is that that's kind of flipped around now that we are so good in higher education generating so many graduates with degrees that lead them into these professions that those professions have now seen their compensation accelerate. So that's actually producing a widening gap between their incomes, their earnings, their wealth, as well as those who don't have that kind of access. I mean, it's almost like the success of higher education led to an ongoing of this mission. Well, I would say that insofar as we increase access to higher education and graduate more people or bring in more immigrants with high levels of education, both of those in and of themselves will tend to depress the wage gap between those with a college degree and those with a high school diploma. But I think what's tricky is that all these other things have been happening at the same time that we've been kind of gradually ramping up the supply of college educated workers. One of them is this explosion of new technologies. One is the urbanization of the economy, urbanization of life, moving away from farms. We continue to see every year more people moving to cities in rich countries and in poor countries as well. That creates demand for new types of jobs if you're a city that is living in a city with a lot of rich professionals. They are going to have high levels of demand for childcare workers. They're gonna have high levels of demand for restaurant workers. And those are fairly low paying jobs. And so you'd expect income inequality in the city to not really be resolved itself because you've got this situation where richer people are requiring the services of lower income people. And then there's a group in the middle which I think a lot of us would like to foster more of which would be kind of skilled technicians. People that don't necessarily have to go all the way to a bachelor's degree level but can still earn a good living in a skilled trade. There's those types of jobs still exist. Some of them have been offshored but certainly in the construction industry they're local and they're not going anywhere. There's jobs, of course, in plumbing and installation maintenance repair that just about every city needs. And increasingly there's jobs at lower levels for technicians related to IT and computers as well as healthcare. And so those are promising avenues that could shore up the middle class and it's very important that high schools and community colleges play important roles in providing high quality educational opportunities so that people can access those in an affordable way. The other issue that we haven't even talked about yet is the growing cost of college. Right. Well, I'll stop there for now but there's a lot of ways we can take this. We actually have a question directly on that point. So let me just put this on the screen. So friends, if you're new to the forum this is a classic way to participate. This is a question from Julie Good-Fox that's going to Indian Nations University and she asked, after college education do we know if student loans can delay education from the past or otherwise delay occurring potential? It's a great question. I would say the channel that to me that is most compelling as to how it could delay entry onto an upward trajectory is by stopping somebody from getting a loan or for taking the risk of becoming an entrepreneur. One of the trends that my CEO, Jim Clifton, a CalP is most worried about and I'm worried about it too is declining entrepreneurship in the United States. Since 1908 we've seen a pretty dramatic fall in the number of startups and the number of startups per capita and any way you want to really look at it and it's been across different industries even though we think of Silicon Valley and so on as being just this incubator even despite all that activity fewer and fewer people are starting businesses and we think one reason is probably the student loan issue and the fact that when people are graduating they are carrying all this debt. It's certainly not the only issue probably rising healthcare costs also have something to do with it. You're more likely to want to work for a big employer that's providing you benefits than absorbing the risk of not having health insurance or paying for it out of pocket yourself as a sole proprietor or small business owner. So I think those are some of the considerations you need to think about. I would say overall student aside from that channel student loans probably haven't had a tremendously negative effect on leading to upward trajectories and income for graduates because you still have the skills hopefully and then you need to pay back the loan so you're incentivized to take a high paying job and so then the issue is just what is that hit to your net worth due to you? It's going to lay you from buying a house it's going to lay you from starting a business so those are the channels I'm most concerned about in addition to the deterrent effect that the high price of college has on entry and completion in the first place. They have a high sticker price which is what most people say. Oh thank you, that's a great question Dean Fox that's a great question whatever rich answer Jonathan look Gallup do more work on this but we have two more questions that happen at the same time and they're almost the same questions I'm going to put them both up here. This goes back to one of your earlier points. Kelly Walsh asks about urbanization will COVID-19 push people away and then Charles Finley asked the same question is urbanization a trend that will continue past COVID-19? Those are both really good questions and certainly population density is a really important factor to the spread of the virus and the spread of pandemics generally. I do think however that once, especially once there's a vaccine I think the hope that we all have hearing from Francis Collins at the NIH and Dr. Fauci is that we will have a vaccine in about a year, year and a half. It seems to me that that really will be a tremendous change in terms of how people are confronting this and maybe now there will be some reluctance to move to a big city over that period and people who were thinking of moving to big cities may not but I don't think that this fundamentally changes the reasons why people want to live in big cities that the advantages are huge. Essentially allows you to trade with people in a way that is very difficult in rural areas. Now the fact that so many things through Zoom calls, through Shindig and these sorts of technologies have in many ways made it easier to participate in the economy, especially in professional roles remotely and that certainly has taken some of the advantage of being in a dense urban area but the urban economic exposure which focuses on that has generally found that it's not enough to override the advantages at this point. Now whether technologies get even better the next 10 years or so and that starts to go the other way has yet to be seen obviously but I suspect that this very long historical trend of moving towards cities of the increased professionalization of the economy will continue and a lot of those advantages that we see from being able to network locally being able to connect to people locally will continue. Well, those are great questions gentlemen and that's a very, very rich answer. Let's hope we get a vaccine sooner rather than later. Along these lines we have a question going back to one of your earlier points which has to do with the exclusivity of higher education versus open access. I want to welcome Mark Rush from Washington Lee University. Hello, Mark. Hey there, can you hear me okay? Perfectly. Oh good, good to be here first time. The, oops, did I lose you? Nope, can you still see us? Yeah, I just lost sight of me. The question I wanted to ask John and thanks Brian for pulling me up is we're really looking at sort of a system wide issue of economic inequality and so forth and then access to higher education. It seems to me that the real quick challenge we face isn't so much one of wanting to get to higher ed as it is one of the hurdles that the higher ed sector seems to build towards access. We celebrate exclusivity more than access to higher ed. Such an observation, I'm wondering how higher ed than as a sector to be able to restructure itself to address that. You can't solve all of society's problems of inequality but it can help. And can you identify is there maybe an American state or another country that seems to be doing this? And it's going to be a slow impact but perhaps there's a model that could work that wouldn't scare people. What do you know? Yeah, yeah, great question. So there's a lot of ways I could take that. One thought is that in some of the work that I've done both seven years ago I was at the Brookings Institution and more recently Gallup was to try to think of ways to highlight colleges that are specifically succeeding for lower income workers or lower income students or for students who are not scoring near the top of the SAT distribution. And so one way of doing that that I developed on was that Brookings was to try to look at what are called value added measures of value measured outcomes. So in that case, so a simple exercise took earnings data from the department of education, the college scorecard and looked at how the characteristics of students predict those earnings. So of course, students that come in with higher SAT scores and ACT scores are earning higher on average. But once you adjust for those things, you adjust for the income of students. There's this unexplained variation in earnings and some schools are much more consistently better at generating students with higher earnings given the characteristics of the student body than others. And one of the findings there is that, which won't surprise many of you, is that the schools that were more focused on STEM skills tended to consistently do better. So one in Indiana Rose Holman graduates almost exclusively students in computer science and engineering and they tend to get very high paying jobs right after college. So of course there's more to life than just earnings and I'm sure many of you are tired of the STEM versus liberal arts debates, so I won't get into that. But there are other ways to look at this. One is by something that we did with Strada and some Gallup polling work that we've done is to ask alumni whether they would recommend their school to other people and questions along those lines that get to the subjective quality of the educational experience. And that was less tied to your actual skills and the income you're earning, although they were related. But it gets at some of those other intangible factors that matter to somebody's career whether they feel like they're applying their skills in a useful way. But it also highlights the fact that there are schools out there that are kind of hidden gems that are doing very well that aren't the top of the US News and World Report rankings, but that are generating consistently good experience for students. So that's one way to try to just try to move away from selectivity and exclusivity, as you say rightly, as kind of the benchmarks of success. I think what we should care a lot more about is the quality of the experiences that students are having. And then as they reflect back from the experience as an alumni who's now out in the labor market, do they feel like their education was worthwhile and helpful to them and the extent to which they do seems to really predictive of other things we'd care about like their overall evaluation of their life and that sort of thing. So that's one approach. And then yeah, the other things going to more of a policy perspective that strike me as important is emphasizing in high school access to gaining specific technical skills that are gonna be useful in the labor market. I think there's been a lot of emphasis on trying to get students to take AP classes. That they're kind of college ready and they can make some inroads there and maybe not have to pay for an extra class or two. But in addition to that track, which is perfectly worthwhile, I find this sort of program that's available in Virginia Beach, for example, where they've got a very high quality community college that works with the high school. Anybody can take classes that almost inevitably result in a formal certification at the community college during their junior or senior year of high school. And then they could, if they wanted to, immediately get a decent job or which I think a more promising option is that they take the specific technical knowledge that they have and then they go get a bachelor's degree or an associate's degree. Hopefully they're not spending a fortune doing so but they are bringing with them skills that are quite valuable, that they can build upon and maybe combine with a liberal arts education, maybe combine with STEM education or something else along those lines. But just being, recognizing that high schools, which are already free and public, can do a better job of preparing young students to both be more successful college and to also be more successful labor market. Well, Mark, thank you for that great, and Jonathan, that was a small book that you just said. That was a very, very great book. Thank you. Friends, if you're new to the forum, this is the way it's that easy to bring someone up on video to talk and it's always good to see some space and see the space where they are and to hear their voice. We have more questions coming in, like Matt. I want to flash up one from Matthew Cohen, from Cohen Strategy Group. And he brings up, not a question, which is observation. For students to be successful, they need guidance that supports all dimensions of their well-being. Too often, the biggest barriers to academic success have very little academics. Matthew, if you want to follow up with that, either just type in another comment or click the raised hand. We'd love to follow that. Based on that, if you could respond to that, Jonathan. Well, we do see evidence of that and some of the consulting. One thing we do at Gallup is we do some consulting in higher education and we've been working with some colleges and trying to shore up their retention, and especially of online students in graduate programs, which is, of course, a great moneymaker for a lot of schools now. They can charge kind of full rates and it's online, the costs aren't quite as, it's not quite as expensive to provide those services. But the retention rates are often lower. And so we're trying to unpack what's behind that. And grades and GPA are one thing, but to Matthew's point, there's more than that. So one thing that we've identified is that students who are juggling work responsibilities, childcare responsibilities, those sorts of things are much less likely to finish the program. And then, so that raises the issue, well, is there anything that the school can do to be more helpful, to provide more greater flexibility, to kind of work with the students in some way, whether it's through kind of guidance counseling or in another way, to help the students who are in those positions and are really juggling some serious challenges to navigate those more successfully. Well, that's a good answer. Matthew, welcome, would you like to continue on? Yeah, hi, how are you guys? And Brian, just a quick note of thanks for you to continuing to keep the community engaged and connected through this time. I appreciate you're hosting these and continuing to do these. And I know that other folks share my appreciation. So I just wanted to say that, but thank you. Yes, so trends which have been already occurring, it seems to have been accelerated by this pandemic, particularly around some of the inequities in and around higher education. The need has really only increased and intensified for high quality education. The campus-based resources that were previously offered to help scaffold and support students must also migrate online. So what I'm wondering is how can we accelerate progress moving forward, especially for our most vulnerable communities, particularly the ones that you just identified that are encountering food and housing insecurity, transportation issues, Wi-Fi connectivity issues and others, I'll suspend there. Yeah, I mean, those are tough challenges. Some of them, unfortunately, probably beyond the scope of what the university can afford to deal with. But then there may be others where you can think of kind of creative solutions. One could be even kind of trying to build community among online students, give them opportunities to have virtual gatherings outside of scheduled hours where they can exchange notes and help each other out academically. At least, you've got some of the better students in the class helping some of the students who are struggling with material. That could, those relationships and then also the literal help that they're offering could be enough to tip the scales in some cases to keep people engaged. But yeah, it's gonna be hard for colleges, given the huge level of cost that they're already dealing with and the kinds of programs they're dealing with to really ramp up services, I think. But some that they're already providing that could be moved online that occurred to me would be things like guidance counseling and any kind of medical and psychiatric services where one positive outcome of this pandemic is that the telemedicine trends have accelerated and more hospitals, insurance companies, that sort of thing are moving forward with offering those kinds of services and funding them. So that's maybe one area where I could see services that are typically only campus-based could migrate successfully to online. Thank you. I think that you're absolutely right that college is a great route out of poverty but in order for that path to work, students must escape the conditions of poverty long enough to complete that degree. And I hope that college is during this time will continue to step up. E.T., well, thanks very much for this college's question. Thank you. We have more questions and comments just flooding in. Jonathan, you really tapped a very, very rich vein. We have one looking ahead a little bit and this is from Sarah, whose name I always try not to massacre, Sangragoria, who asks, she's been reading about students taking a gap year. How do you think that's likely to affect student loan impairment, shift to trades and enrollment in general? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I mean, I wouldn't, I don't have a strong view about encouraging it or discouraging it. I think some of it will be kind of a case by case basis. The, I think the positive aspects of it that I see is that it helps maybe resolve one concern is that where students are going in too early without really knowing what they want to study without having a clear major pathway in front of them. And so if they do take that gap year, that could help clarify that role. So they're gonna waste fewer resources and time on classes that aren't relevant to ultimately the major that they wanna pick. The other thing that I think is really important is just learn, there's just the practical skills that they can learn by entering the labor force. If there are only jobs up until that point where some are jobs or maybe no work at all, then those early experiences, even if it's a one-year internship or some kind of low-paid occupation, if it's hopefully it's at least in a field that they feel like is relevant to them in the long run and they're acquiring some skills. It's amazing, I think even how even using Microsoft Office products, if you're working at the lowest level in a professional office, you can really make a difference and can make it easier to then finish your degree once you end up enrolling. So I think those are, and the other thing it does is it potentially clarifies, in clarifying the track that you wanna take, it can shorten the course. So you may realize that you wanna be a registered nurse. And before you, and you realize that by doing some, working at a fairly low-paying job as a health aid that requires maybe just a certification or no credentials at all, and then you pursue an associate's degree. And before having that experience, you may have thought that you needed to get a bachelor's degree. And so there, I do think there could be some efficiency gains of kind of testing out some of the labor market to some extent. Although I gotta say that was not, my experience was to go straight through and just get it over with and accumulate as many degrees as possible then enter the labor market. So I think it really will depend on the individual. Ultimately, yes. That's always the parallel macro analysis that comes back to what individuals would do and see. We have a series of questions that are wonderful that all came in from Sergio Costa, who's at CUNY School of Public Health. And let me just read one of these, which is how can higher education become more sophisticated in detecting on-demand skills that can inform certificates or programs? There are lots of emerging alternative educational providers who would not produce well-rounded students. Higher ed should meet those needs. I think that's a really great question. And one that I had a chance to think about and work on. So I think the observation is dead on places like the University of Phoenix, Kaplan, the for-profit online schools have been very adept, I think it's fair to say, at figuring out exactly what employers are looking for and then at least advertising that that's what they're offering students. And I think the reality when you look at the outcomes is that in many cases, students are struggling to get what was advertised to them with those degrees. At least that's evidence from a variety of sources. I've looked at. And then so the question is what could traditional colleges and places like CUNY, you learn from what those more flexible for-profit schools are doing. So I think there are some ways. There are companies that do things like provide web scraping of job vacancy advertisements and encode them for specific skills that employers are looking for. So some kind of research exercises that I've done and that has bled over to consulting work and higher education is to try to give schools a sense of which skills are most intimate in their metropolitan area and then which would employers are providing those skills. So a company like Burning Glass is one of these that is kind of web scraping that you could do this sort of analysis with. And if you do it, it's not like you have to do it every month or anything like that. If you do it every few years or so, it's probably enough to keep up with just sense of what kind of programming languages are in demand, what kind of software are employers looking for and job vacancy ads. And then you also get a sense of kind of the range of certifications that are common and not all of those are gonna be directly transferable to the curriculum that you have. There may presidents or the deans may wanna shift around some resources a little bit to accommodate that, but I think it also could just be professors who see that this new software package is more in demand than the one that they had when they were in school and maybe just take some time to learn the new one and then incorporate that in the classroom and that could be even enough to kind of give a leg up to the students, especially if it's a programming language or something that is gonna be directly relevant to a potential job. Sergio, that was a great question. Jonathan, that's a very, very powerful answer. We have a reminder from Catherine who asked us to remind us that the majority of students are not traditional age and we're not full-time residential even before COVID. So thank you. And it's really important to keep that demographic reality in mind. Thank you. I'd like to bring, we've been talking with the market of it and I'd like to bring up a previous guest on the program who is a not only a fantastic commentator but also a very, very deep thinker in higher education. This is Stephen Downs coming to you from Canada and let me see if we can add him to talk about the market and how we might change market conditions perhaps. Hello, fellow UFW alumna. So hello and thanks for having me up, long time listener for, no, I'm just kidding. I wanna reframe things ever so slightly because I think we're talking about different things when we talk about inequality and being polite. I think the inequality that you're raising is a bit of straw man. So I have a prop. I'm not sure how well that comes across. Very well. Okay, so you get the idea, right? The inequality that you've been talking about is the inequality between say maybe the top five or 10% and the rest. That would be the inequality between professionals and non-professionals and that's what's come up a lot. But the real structural inequality and arguably the cause for all the rest of our problems are arguably is the massive gains being made by the top 1% and it's not on this chart but also the gains being made in corporate wealth, concentration of corporate wealth and the rest. And the reason why that's important is because the common discourse is that university helps people move out of poverty and address the inequality gap by addressing things like skills and competencies, education, somebody mentioned entrepreneurship, et cetera. Arguably, first of all, none of this will help. And secondly has been hinted at the benefits of a university education for people of lower classes coming into university are notably much less than the benefits that rich people get. Rich people don't even have to finish and they can still found multi-billion dollar companies. Poor people have to finish pay off their loans and maybe they'll break even. So I could put this in the form of a question, has Gallup actually looked at how well poor people do in universities but more to the point, have we established statistically a relation not between university attendance and lower income but between increased skills and lower income because from my observation and we made a bunch of pro-union comments in the chat thread, the issue has nothing to do with skills except that the payment or return on skills has been declining steadily over the years and the return on having wealth being in the financial industry, et cetera, being part of the ownership class has been increasing. And how can or would possibly universities or the education system in general change that? Well, I love this comment and you're really getting into the heart of the book now. Honestly, there's some discussion about higher education in the book but a lot gets at a lot the issues that you're talking about. And first of all, I agree entirely that most of the action in terms of income inequality in the United States and other rich countries is the gap between the 1% and others. And that does raise the obvious point that not everybody who goes to college makes it to the 1% and so it can't be college alone that explains it. And so I go through the first chapter of the book, honestly debunks a lot of the existing theories about why income inequality in the United States has increased and one of the ones that I spend the most time debunking throughout the book is the one that it's about skills. And I had a piece in the New York Times upshot where I presented a thought exercise that's in the book and the thought exercise goes like this. What if we paid everybody based on their observable skills? So how they score on IQ tests and also how they score on personality tests because we know that that's a non-cognitive skills what it's called that is also valuable in the labor market and valuable kind of intuitively if somebody's conscientious, they're showing up for work they're doing their work on schedule and that kind of thing their employer's gonna be happier. So if you paid somebody based on those things and also you made any kind of other adjustments that you want, what you'd see is the income distribution wouldn't go up it would fall by half. So that suggests that we're overpaying people in 1% and in fact, I have direct evidence of the book that people in 1% really aren't scoring any higher on those kinds of IQ tests than the rest of us. And you don't get there because you're a genius you get there, I spent a lot of time saying who gets there and why? And my estimations are that about half of the people that make it to the 1% are in industries or occupations they can have special privileges in the economy. And so you mentioned finance, that's one that will be obvious to a lot of people and within finance people in the hedge fund industry in particular enjoy very high gains famously to and 20 is the rule of compensation where you get 20% of the earnings of your customers. I think that's a great deal. If you're a hedge fund manager, I think it's a terrible deal if you're a union worker whose pension fund is invested in hedge funds and the largest investors in hedge funds are union pension funds. And so they're basically stealing from workers and giving them to rich people who live in Connecticut. That's my perspective on it anyway. And then I didn't think you would. And then the other sort of disproportionate groups of people who are in the 1% would include highly regulated occupations. Doctors are the number one group about 20% of people in the 1%, maybe 15, let's say 15 are doctors, another 7% are lawyers. And what's special about these groups is that first of all, you can't practice unless you jump through a whole bunch of hurdles and that obviously involves more than just getting a bachelor's degree, involves a very expensive pathway through the education system. And then the other thing that's special about these groups is that you can't provide their services or even you can't compete with them even if you're qualified to do so unless you overcome their lobbying efforts. So nurse practitioners have been deemed qualified to provide family and general practice medicine by the National Academy of Science and by a number of states, but in the largest states in the country it's illegal for a nurse practitioner to practice independently. He or she has to work under a doctor and share the profits with the doctor in the doctor's office. And likewise for dental hygienists, likewise for legal technicians. So Washington State recently created a licensed legal technician role that didn't exist before because there was a shortage of people that were available to provide family counseling services to couples who were going through divorce, child custody disputes, all sorts of family legal issues that arise for low income families that can't afford a lawyer. So the state supreme court ruled that these licensed technicians could provide counsel that they could not represent them in court. It was violently opposed by the bar association of the state of Washington and it's been resisted very strongly by the national bar association. So it hasn't spread to any other state. And so those are examples of people that could provide the same services for half the cost with much less education. People who received the services from those people are happy, but all the money's going to the 1% because they've rigged the market to their... Well, remember you're speaking to someone from Canada, right? Our legal and medical environment is very different and we don't have many of the same issues as exist in the United States. We have a public healthcare system, which not only ensures all of us, it also costs on average half as much as the US system, which suggests to me that a big part of the problem is structural as opposed to related to competition. And this gets to one of the criticisms of universities that I've often made and I'll just leave this with a parting question comment. And to what degree are universities involved in entrenching and maintaining that structural inequality, both the structural inequality we see for compensation, but also the structural inequality that preserves the privilege of the 1%. We see institutes like Harvard and Yale and the rest who are basically in the business of making sure, from my perspective, that the wealthy stay wealthy. And that's similarly the function of the healthcare system, the legal system and so on. Structurally, they preserve the wealth of the rich. So what role do universities play in preserving this inequality and what could they do to change, to begin to think about actually producing greater equity in society? And I argue they would have to change substantially. Well, for me, the thing that I would change the most I think is absolutely critical for universities to change is to make themselves far more efficient than they are and by that I mean providing services at a much lower cost, whether that cost is borne by state governments, the federal government or by parents and students through student loans is kind of to me a secondary issue. I think there's very good evidence that as with healthcare, we as Americans are overpaying for higher education and like with healthcare, you can compare the costs per student or per capita to other countries and see that they're getting very nice outcomes. And when you look at adult literacy and numeracy scores, the United States ranks very poorly compared to countries around the world. And so that doesn't speak well to the overall structure of our education system K through 12 through high red. And it is a problem if our universities are just going to become bastions of the world's elite students and just cater to them and not bring up students from diverse backgrounds and offer services that are affordable and relevant to them, then I think that's a really serious problem. I do think, fortunately, the good news on maybe not as pessimistic as you are about universities in terms of their willingness to become funnels for upward mobility and to try to reach those students. I do think, first of all, they need to lower prices and if that means cutting costs so be it, but they also need to think about, well, you know, some of the issues that we just discussed in terms of, is there endowment serving? Who's their endowment serving? Is it, it is kind of obnoxious to me that billions of dollars and alumni donations and former student tuition is going to hedge funds and elite bankers and not going to current students who need tuition reductions. I think that's one thing. The other is, yeah, I think it was harder for universities to control. I think we need to do healthcare system and university leaders ideally would be on the front lines of helping think through what a better healthcare system that's far more efficient than the current one we have, the United States would look like and more equitable. But I think that's really beyond their control. Yeah, certainly if they're influential in the American Medical Association and American Bar Association, I think there's opportunities to reform in those cases, which are things that I'd encourage them to do, but I'll stop there. I mean, those- Jonathan, Steven, I have to stop you there because not only have we reached a fantastic point, but we've also just shot past the end of the hour and I want to respect everyone's time. Steven, thank you so much as always for joining us. And Jonathan, thank you for such a fantastic answer. I really appreciate where you just took us in the last 15 minutes. I'm conscious of times, I've got to ask a closing question. What's the best way for people to keep up with you and your work? Well, I almost always post my latest research on Twitter, which is not everybody's favorite platform. I have mixed feelings about it myself, but if you want to see my latest work, you can buy Twitter feed at JT Rothwell. JT Rothwell, very good, very good. And if we need to get a copy of your book, we have a link to it down there on the bottom left corner of the screen. Jonathan, thank you so much. We're gonna have to bring you back just because this is so rich and so fantastic. Well, I really appreciate the opportunity and a really great discussion with your guests here. So it's a lot of fun.